I’m a grown-up. I know that I’m supposed to be employing these enforced stay-at-home leisure hours with sedate pastimes suitable for a gentleman of more than half a century. What pastimes are those, exactly? Bonsai? Numismatology? The Jumble? Sitting in an easy chair, wearing a sweater vest, gently chuckling over the collected essays of Jean Shepherd?
Nah. I have been spending my time in isolation playing video games. I’ve loved video games since I first reverently slipped a quarter into a cabinet edition of Pong at the 1974 Virginia state fair. Shoved in among the pachinko units and the Bally pinball machines in a dirty tent toward the back of the midway, Pong’s electronic bloops and bleeps as its square slowly volleyed between two rectangular paddles mesmerized me deeply as a ten-year-old. To lure me back outdoors, my father had to ante up promises of an elephant ear, then sweeten the pot with promises of a trip to the fun house.
As a teen I spent my after school hours at the Station Break arcade in the louche neighborhood bordering my parents’ university, saving doomed cities in Missile Command. When I was a high school sophomore, I saved my lawn-mowing money to purchase my first home gaming console, an Atari 2600. My memory of my college junior year consists almost entirely of hunching over the Crystal Castles machine in the Tinee Giant convenience store across from my dorm. It’s safe to say that I have a lifetime love of video gaming.
And now, in these days in which the long hours seem to fill all too easily with emptiness and anxiety, for me there’s no greater antidote than allowing myself to be soothed by pixels dancing across an LCD screen. (Hey, the World Health Organization said I should.)
Some might imagine that video games are by their nature isolated from the events of the world. Super Mario is forever chasing after Princess Peach in yet another castle; Ms. Pac-Man is doomed to spend her multiple lives munching pellets down the same hallways, haunted by the same ghosts. Neither of them receive news reports of pandemics in the worlds outside the boxes they play upon. But there’s actually a lot of spillover from the real world into those universes behind a glowing screen.
And vice-versa. Years ago, I had a love affair with World of Warcraft, a virtual universe in which hundreds of thousands of players at a time occupied a world together, questing and grouping up together or ignoring each other as each went about his business. In 2005 there was a famous incident known today as the Corrupted Blood Plague—a programming bug gone rogue, in which players who’d finished the newest group dungeon returned to one of the game’s metropolitan centers infected with a fatal disease. Infected players would rather explode into a gout of blood and then die as a pile of bones.
The problem was that the plague was highly contagious; anyone who’d been in contact with one of those plagued dungeon divers could catch Corrupted Blood. The newly-infected could then spread it to someone in proximity. Very quickly, as Corrupted Blood leapt from one player to a nearby other, the major cities in the game became a landscape of corpses. Of course, death isn’t permanent in WoW. But players would try to run their spirits back to their bodies to resurrect, only to catch the plague from someone nearby once again. Entire servers ground to a halt as players died, revived, then tried to run a few feet, only to die over and over again as they attempted to escape the plague-ridden city streets.
I remember being online trapped between the capitals of Ironforge and Stormwind when the plague hit, intrigued but panicked at the communications from friends and guild members. Don’t go near the cities! they’d warn, as they’d frantically type out descriptions of the scenes of carnage around them. Those of us fortunate enough to have been somewhere rural and isolated when the plague began were spared a bloody death, but we were far from unaffected. All the banking was in the cities. The shops, the houses in which we could put our goods up for auction, the inns where some of us made our homes—all in WoW’s expansive metropolitan areas.
Our reactions as players ran the gamut as well. Some numbskulls gamely would hitch a griffon and fly into the havoc just for the LOLs of it. (Obviously, these would be the same folk in Florida crowding the beaches today, or congregating for coronavirus parties.) Other more noble souls playing classes with healing skills attempted to brave the cities in an attempt to cleanse as many sick people as they could of the disease, while shielding themselves as long as possible from the plague’s deadly affects. They too eventually perished. Many simply attempted to isolate themselves as best they could in remote areas, socially distancing themselves from the plague and from anyone else who might bring it to them. Or else they logged off—the best social distancing of all.
The Corrupted Blood Plague was quite a phenomenon at the time it happened; it was one of the first times I recall that the social aspects of a video game made mainstream news. More interestingly, epidemiologists studied the event, including scientists who used the in-game plague recently to make projective models of how COVID-19 would spread in the real world, and of the degrees of seriousness with which real-life people would take the epidemic.
The games I play now might be a haven from my real-world anxieties, but neither are they completely sheltered from the realities of what’s going on around us. One of the games in which I’ve immersed myself for the last year and a half is Fallout 76, an online multi-player entry in the Fallout series of post-apocalyptic roleplaying games. 76 takes place twenty-five years after a nuclear war that brought civilization to a standstill, set in the deserted hills and slag heaps of West Virginia. Across the expansive map of West Virginia, only twenty-four players co-exist on any single server at a time, questing, killing mutated creatures, and participating occasionally in events that bring them together.
I’m fond of 76’s serene, permanently autumnal setting and its lonely solitude. Mostly, though, I’m in it because it’s a game in which I can find stuff, search for stuff, pick up stuff, look into containers for stuff, and then turn stuff into other stuff. For me it’s basically a game that allows me to become a digital candidate for Hoarding: Buried Alive in a way I’d never allow myself in my real life.
I venture out into the deserted dead world and scavenge in ruined houses and deserted amusement parks and ski resorts and farms for abandoned items of clothing, for beer bottles and tin cans, for boxes of scouring cleaner and old teddy bears and boxed food and acetone canisters and turpentine and old typewriters and desk fans. Then I lug my precious loot back home and scrap everything for parts. From those parts I can craft walls and floors, roofs, furniture, and all manner of lighting and decorations for the little homestead I’ve scraped together and established on a silent road outside of Morgantown. I also get to create vending machines to sell homemade armor, food, scrap, and baked goods to other players passing through.
Yes, basically I play Fallout 76 as a post-nuclear variation on The Sims—I make it a decorating and house-building game with occasional irksome yet necessary jaunts to clear out nests of deathclaws and Super Mutants so I can bring home more stuff with which to decorate my little holocaust gas station, where machines vending baked goods stand where the gas pumps ought to be.
One of the reasons I like 76 is the unrelenting cheerfulness of the player base. I’ve been playing online games long enough that I’ve seen the gamut of bad behaviors. Temper tantrums. Dog-piling. Misogynistic and homophobic name-calling. And in WoW, enough ganking—the mean-spirited in-game bullying of low-level players unable to defend themselves against the more experienced high-level warriors—to make Heathers look like Little Women. Fallout 76, though, isn’t a particularly popular game. It has a reputation, perhaps earned in its early days, of being exquisitely buggy to the point of being unplayable. It didn’t review well. Its aficionados could have spent their tenure in Appalachia wandering around shell-shocked and defensive, but just about everyone I encounter on the servers is cheerful, good-natured, and helpful.
People stop by my roadside gas station and let me know how much they love what I’ve built; they’ll shop at my machines and lounge on my sofa and we’ll play the piano and bass upstairs together in my little parlor. Instead of ganking level 1 players, those at 100 or above descend upon them bearing gifts of armor and weapons and plans for them to learn; we’ll buy out whatever nonsense junk a new player puts into her vending machines, just so she’ll have a little cash of their own. For a game that’s essentially a first-person shooter set in a radioactive hellscape, Fallout 76 is pretty much the next friendliest little community next to Mayberry R.F.D.
One of the things I noticed in my daily Appalachian encounters, about two weeks ago when life started shutting down, was how frequently visitors to my camp were wearing protective facewear. Once my real-life social distancing had started, in the game I dug out from the depths of my inventory a plague doctor’s mask, and paired its beaked nose with a leather cap and an body-covering outfit that included gloved hands. After that, day by day, I witnessed players changing their everyday outfits to correspond with what was happening in the world around them. Instead of road leathers or power armor, more and more people began visiting wearing fuzzy robes, pajamas, and slippers, their faces covered with medical masks. There were a handful of plague doctors like myself, and others stopping by in hazmat suits that protected them from head to toe. Gas masks suddenly became popular. Everywhere in West Virginia I’d travel, players were dressing themselves up in out-of-the-usual clothing that indicated their tangible isolation and—judging by the handkerchiefs and bandanas worn over their mouths—a certain consideration of the pandemic driving us into the virtual world.
Toilet paper has become a popular item in 76 as well. Part of my routine, every time I log in, is to scavenge through the various public restrooms in buildings through the world to collect rolls of toilet paper—which I’ll then put into my vending machine. With the real-life shortages of toilet paper across the country, everyone’s hopped onto the hoarding of virtual toilet paper. We’ve basically a player-created mini-game within the game itself in which we log in, peek in restroom after restroom, and fill our inventories with toilet paper rolls to sell in our vending machines at exorbitant prices. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. No one poops in Fallout 76. Videogame toilet paper serves no real purpose. But occasionally someone will buy several rolls of bathroom tissue from my machine for a cool 2500 apiece, and I’ll return the favor by visiting her vendor to see how much of her toilet paper I can buy. It’s a silly time-waster—but then again, what else do we have to do?
Even in the bucolic landscape of the cartoon-y Animal Crossing series, the latest installment of which released just as much of the world retreated into hiding, I’ve seen player after player donning respirators and surgical masks before they visit another player’s village—and I’ve seen a lot of home islands created this last week with the name ‘Quarantine.’ People playing Minecraft post photos of the hospitals and emergency services tents they’ve been building in their games.
Video games might be a retreat from the stresses of the world. At the same time, they can’t help but be part of it. Any game that gives players agency to create their own narratives is going to see this pandemic woven into the stories that players choose to create with their names, their mode of dress, the ways in which they interact with each other. Reflecting aspects of real life in virtual worlds gives players an outlet for creativity and commentary. It reminds us that there are frightened people behind the plague doctor’s masks. And ultimately, there’s real solace to take in knowing that in this virtual community of strangers, all of us have foremost in our minds the same fears and anxieties.
This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .
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